The French mind their language being woke

With Europe’s vaccine fiasco in full swing, caused in part by injudicious comments by Emmanuel Macron, the French are not in my good books right now. But even if President Macron can’t control his own use of words, the guardians of French care a great deal about their langue. Certainly, their attempts to protect French by committee (the Académie Française) are chuckleworthy, but their latest bout of linguistic propriety is to be commended.

One of the regrettable effects of the hegemony of woke on the French language has been the creep of unwieldy genderinclusive forms of speech, which require adding extra suffixes to words to counteract their grammatical gendering. “Chers collègues” (dear colleagues) becomes “Cher·e·s collègues” to cover both gender bases. “Electeurs” (voters) becomes “électeur·rice·s”, and so on. The form began in the academic world – surprise, surprise – but has now spread to Left-wing parties and councils.

Consternation at this inclusive suffix form has reached such a pitch that 60 MPs have put forward a law to ban its use.

Meanwhile, the Académie Française, which guards the linguistic purity of the language, has said the form puts French “in mortal danger”. And Édouard Philippe, the former prime minister, ordered ministers not to use it. English has also become overrun of late with soul-destroying, mind-numbing woke jargon, almost all of it to do with “inclusivity” – whether in gendered pronouns (as in a singular “they” for any individual whose gender is unknown or unspecified) or all the other targets of the ideology.

Unlike French, it’s not in our language’s DNA to be formally protectable. But when it comes to the tyranny of woke, I can’t help but feel that’s something of a shame.